It
is said no two fingerprints are alike… whorls, loops and arches of
flesh that separate one person’s identity from another. I leave
fingerprints everywhere. In the elevator, I press the doughy pads of my
fingertips against the walls, the cool metal railing, leaving an oily
smudge behind. In stores I gently massage sales counters […]

Luke
Hurley was his name. I remember him well though he was only around for a
few months. He was the new boy at school – pale, freckled, with
straight, greasy-black hair falling into his blue eyes that flitted
about like a bouncy ball. A head smaller than me he looked too young to
be […]

She
doesn’t think about Max’s eyes, or the way his fingers felt wrapped in
hers. She doesn’t think of how sunlight looked caught in the tangle of
his wild hair, or the way his laughter could scramble up and down the
length of her, ripple across her skin like a tickling wind. Sitting here
now, […]

This
is the latest in Sara Lippmann’s Read it Loud: Notes From Storytime. To
go to the column page, please click here. It’s been months since my
last column because for a while now at bedtime we’ve been working on my
son’s reading. My son just finished kindergarten and in kindergarten
it’s all about reading […]

Hannah
took a long lunch and drove through the falling snow towards home. The
expressway was clear of traffic but as yet unsalted, and Hannah felt the
car, every few moments, gliding just above the road. She ignored the
static that had replaced Joan Baez on the radio. It was a song she
adored, but […]

This
is the latest in Meg Tuite’s Exquisite Quartet. To go to the column
page, please click here. One slice of the world was magnetic,
charismatic and resigned itself to nothing. It stood like a boulder on
the hot, pressurized seat of duress. It had dove-white hair in two, fat
matching pigtails on either side […]

I
wear strange outfits when there are no people around. I wear only
normal outfits when there are some people around, unless there is
something startlingly happening to me like sunshine, and makes me forget
the way I am or what I look like in real life. This is happening more
often these days on […]

They
found Peter in the morning. I was in the kitchen eating shelled
walnuts. He’s in the silo, my father said, and hung a blanket over my
shoulders. He looked over at the cook, shrugged his shoulders and the
cook sighed and stirred the soup. I walked down to the pasture, my
father trailing me. […]

You
were a lover of views never one for things not meant to be seen, like
the forgotten back lots inside dark city blocks. So I held the pen
awhile, with that thought in my head, and marveled at the space around
my signature, how light the lease papers looked with only one name
holding […]

Bloodhound
Eyes Audrey is dead, suddenly, so young. I sat beside her in the youth
symphony— first violin, fourth chair, behind her brother, Ben. We played
Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Liszt—chins pressed into violin rests,
horsehair bows sweeping strings together. Audrey was big as a
linebacker, gawky as a preteen, as spare of words and visible […]